Every shirt I have that is okay to wear to work is at least three years old, so I’m starting to face the uncomfortable truth that I’m going to have to do some clothes shopping before this school year starts.

(Fun fact: I have two polo shirts that date back to my first teaching job. They are twenty-five years old. They somehow still fit and they do not, in any way, look their age. I promise I’d have tossed them by now if they had gotten ratty.)

Anyway, the tl;dr of this post is that it’s astonishing how many clothes websites are scams, and I came across an especially crispy example of the genre today. I’ve been scammed twice by clothing websites before, and I’m at the point now where before I order from any website I’m not familiar with I Google the name of the site and look for drama. If I find it, they don’t get my money. I saw a shirt I liked in an ad on a website I go to a lot (honestly, I’m at the point where “advertises on websites” is a reason to suspect fuckery is afoot) and clicked on it, and it wasn’t twenty seconds later before I decided the site was a joke.

That shirt above isn’t the shirt I clicked on, but take a look at that picture. There is no fucking way that’s a picture of a real shirt. Like, I’m not bothered by the idea that they might have dropped a model in front of a beach; that’s whatever, but that entire image is AI, and it’s not even fucking good AI. Look at the bottom seam of the shirt. It looks like plastic, and the colors on the entire thing are way too saturated to be real. The collar looks suspicious as hell, too.

This is so obviously a scam– and, upon doing my due diligence, the clothes ship direct from China, because of course they do– that I’m honestly tempted to order that shirt just to compare whatever I get– some cobwebs in a Zip-Loc bag is my guess– to the original image.

Shopping for clothing online, at least for anything more complicated than a T-shirt, was already ludicrous for a whole host of reasons, but it’s gotten to the point where I’m going to have to refuse to shop anywhere other than Amazon or brick and mortar places, and there aren’t a lot of brick and mortar places left that carry my size that aren’t ludicrously expensive.

Slightly related, I got an email from my district earlier today that spirit wear for 2025-26 was available, and went to take a look. Feel free to look around on the site for me bitching about my salary; I know there are plenty of issues with teacher pay, but I personally feel like I’m well-compensated for my work, but they still don’t pay me enough that I’m going to drop $60 on a fuckin’ polo shirt. If I’m wearing a shirt with the logo of the organization I work for, that shirt should be cheap or free. Not more expensive than any other shirt of that style I own.

Anyway, point is, you’ll get a post soon enough where I’m bitching about clothes I actually bought, instead of websites that expect me to send them money so they can send me a bag of ebola. Something for y’all to look forward to.